By the Sweat of Their Brow? 'Street Children', NGOs and Children's Rights in Addis Ababa

Abstract

In the past two decades NGOs helping ‘street children’ in Addis Ababa have distinguished themselves by their adherence to highly controversial assumptions about the nature of childhood and the failure of the poor to raise their children in ways that they conceive as ‘proper’. The ratification of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child by the Ethiopian government has inspired them to stop food relief in order to persuade the children in their care to seek a way out of their miserable ways of life through work on the street. In a remarkable replication of late Victorian philanthropic thinking, NGOs dispel hereby local middle-class fears that relief agencies may foster truancy and idleness and reassuringly define the code—work—that confers legitimacy on children's presence on the streets. Anticipating their escape from undeniably harsh and unjust family relations, the children of the poor are enticed into accepting this solution as the price of a ‘decent’ and morally acceptable childhood. They remain nevertheless highly critical of the rights-based approach, claiming that in the name of their rights they are denied what used to be children's normal entitlement such as protected food prices, free basic health and education. The article is based on the findings of an action research project by social workers among the children assisted by eight Addis Ababa-based NGOs in the period 1996-98.